Moving to the Future of Tax, Step by Step 5 Steps to Future-Ready Tax Moving to the Future of Tax CONTENTS f INTRODUCTION f UPDATE AND CONSOLIDATE f ASSEMBLE DATA FROM MULTIPLE SOURCES f SWIFT, SOLID CALCULATIONS f MOVING TOWARD RESULTS f PLOT A NEW COURSE FORWARD f BUILD A PARTNERSHIP OF SUCCESS f LEARN MORE Explore the Opportunities of Direct Tax Technology TAX Direct tax workflows have always been critical to compliance, but new tools and skills are rapidly increasing their potential strategic benefit. Tax teams can implement solutions that bring speed and simplicity to both daily tactical challenges and longer-term business decisions, all driven by tightly integrated data, documentation, controls and interfaces. This gives tax an expanded leadership role as a provider of broad visibility and deep insight. The complexity of direct tax workflows demands an equally comprehensive tool set that consolidates control while still meeting the precise needs of every step. From compliance and provisioning through entity and documentation management and audit readiness and defense, direct tax works best when powered by seamless digital workflows. These workflows are unified around one goal: accuracy and insight that scales with growth. ONESOURCE allows us They also require the same inputs: accurate, defensible data and documentation. But even to do things better, faster as direct tax processes integrate with diverse systems and teams, control and collaboration and more efficiently must be built atop a single shared platform. This boosts efficiency and eases collaboration through better control across the entire tax lifecycle. From trial balance, to provision, to income tax. It’s also vital to and management of our post-compliance reporting and advanced analytic opportunities made possible by the ability tax processes." to gather, manage and share large amounts of the data needed to enable faster, smarter – TMS International Corp. decision-making that extends well past compliance. Like constructing a building, your direct tax workflows are repeatable global processes. That means more opportunities to understand and improve, and a much broader net effect as workflows get faster and more dynamic with no added risk or complexity. As you move from steel to structure, you perfect both your approach and action plan. This ensures tactics always closely align with strategy, and it allows a solid digital foundation upon which to build. Imagine shaving weeks from your financial close process through the use of tax technology, then seamlessly sharing that data and using it to file your corporate tax return an entire month early. Envision creating analytics and performing peer group benchmarking that gives your management team greater insights into your performance in relation to the global market. This is how tax departments add positively to the bottom line, automating workloads and using time saved for more strategic work. The right tax technology platform is the start. Update and Consolidate Tax departments are responsible for turning complex transactions and calculations into simple, actionable business answers. Whether it’s preparing for audit defense or building for growth, tax With ONESOURCE, you can: workflows must move seamlessly across diverse functional teams, locations and time zones. Expectations around speed and accuracy continue to rise, even as investments in talent and technology lag. • Manage tax data and processes globally • Collaborate across teams Data and Process Management • Assign tasks and monitor project progress • Manage calendars and track due dates Because tax technology offers a customizable and collaborative web-based platform that can be accessed from anywhere, it allows you to take ownership of your company’s data and manage workflow processes globally. Centralized document management and storage allows you to customize security permissions, which can easily establish your tax department as a paperless office. Standardized indexing and search features allow teams to easily comb through an archive of documentation and respond faster to audit requests and other business questions. Task Determination and Automation Utilizing tax technology for task determination and automation improves your efficiency and internal controls by giving you the ability to look into projects and check their status at every stage. With the ability to prioritize tasks, automate manual efforts and track and report on deliverables, tax technology ensures timely project completion. Calendar Management Have you ever wondered if there was an easier way to keep track of the thousands of internal and external obligations that occur throughout the year? By incorporating tax technology, you can track due dates, instantly determine delinquent items, and update the status of outstanding items and flag obligations that need your immediate review. And with customized views and search features, you can quickly obtain deadline information. Assemble Data from Multiple Sources Managing the flow of tax information for modern organizations, especially multinationals, isn’t getting easier, and internal expectations are on the rise as well, especially where global growth is desirable. Data must be found, gathered, validated, calculated, shared and demonstrated. This is time- and labor-intensive work, which is why the average tax department spends 80% of their time collecting and entering data and 20% actually using it. This doesn’t leave much room for strategic contribution. Luckily, tax technology can reverse that trend, automating the heavy lifting and leaving tax experts to more value-added activities. Data Collection Automation and Global Access Tax technology helps you standardize and automate your tax workpapers with secured web-based templates. You control the line items, the organization and which in-house staff and external sources are granted access to it. Data collection software also enables you to distribute and monitor requests and reminders around the globe. Team members in different countries can enter the required information, transform values into local currency and convert it into reporting-ready data in real time. They can also attach notes or documents so that all pertinent information lives with the data, thus strengthening the audit trail and adding a level of detail for analysis. And because the data is stored in a central repository, it is easily accessible for review. Data Optimization Tax professionals know the headaches of gathering data from disparate sources all too well. Tax technology gives you the ability to securely gather and collect data regardless of source, allowing you to seamlessly With ONESOURCE, you can: share the data with both your income tax and tax provision workpapers. It eliminates the need for manual consolidation, making data available for global retrieval and reporting directly from Excel. It also helps to • Gather, collect and integrate data identify duplications or incorrect codes, preventing time-consuming errors, and increasing your compliance. regardless of the data source • Manage and store workpapers securely • Automate and integrate trial balance data • Interact with foreign controllers without using Excel Assemble Data from Multiple Sources Trial Balance Automation In today’s tax environment, it’s common for your department to work with trial balance data that comes from multiple general ledgers, ERPs or other extracts that may have different account-coding structures. Tax technology delivers harmonized and consolidated trial balance data and can keep it up-to-date even as book numbers continue to change. It also enables a common master chart of accounts to standardize trial balance data for the entire tax department, while minimizing administration and maintenance redundancies. This gives you more time to focus on strategic tasks. Data Preservation Additionally, source data can be preserved at a point in time and consolidated to meet necessary requirements, allowing the data to be utilized at the right level for each task. “[With ONESOURCE], we’ve done so much more than we could do with Excel on its own. Using DataFlow, WorkFlow and FileRoom [we] have a complete system. It’s truly a technology, not just a software. You have the technology and tools you need to do your jobs.” — Aflac Swift, Solid Calculations Ultimately, external regulators and internal stakeholders expect one thing from tax: accuracy. Daily operations must provide solid, defensible tax positions. Together these incremental improvements and With ONESOURCE, you can: efficiencies add up to less risk and a clearer vision of the future of tax and what it requires. • Produce an accurate and defendable tax provision Return-to-provision Harmonization • Reduce tax cycle time and complexity Tax technology enables companies to produce a quick and accurate tax provision that is ironclad upon • Share data between income tax return, audit. Additionally, you can manage, complete and e-file the federal, state and local corporate tax returns tax provision and other tax workflows with finalized provision data, reducing duplication of efforts between processes. By using the same data for • Estimate your tax liability quickly return and provision, tax departments can cut days and even weeks from the annual financial close and tax and accurately compliance process while decreasing risk by ensuring data is consistent across tax department processes. Swift, Solid Calculations Accurate and Defendable Provision Calculations With tax technology, you also